Opinion: America once valued life more than guns. How did that change?

Editor’s Note: Dominic Erdozain is a historian and the author of ”One Nation Under Guns.” Follow him on X @domerdozain. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own; view more opinion at CNN.

When does a crisis become a catastrophe? Last month, after a mass shooting in Maine left 18 dead, author Stephen King penned an essay as notable for its brevity as the bleakness of the message. “There is no solution to the gun problem and little more to write,” he began, “because Americans are addicted to firearms.” Americans love their guns, he said, and no suffering, no slaughter can loosen their grip.

Dominic Erdozain – Courtesy Dominic Erdozain

Soon afterwards, we learned that Lane Murdock, the student who led the national school walkout after the Parkland mass shooting of 2018, has left the country. Burned out and disillusioned, Murdock now lives in Scotland, where freedom is a reality and nobody lives in fear of guns.

I appreciate the sentiment. But the picture looks different when you discover that almost everything we now live with, from assault rifles to stand-your-ground laws, is new. This crushing pattern of domestic armament is not the American heritage or the will of the people. It’s a political experiment, conjured and contrived by a militant minority. To see this is to know that something can be done.

America has always had a gun problem, but never on this scale. Every day, 327 people are shot in the United States, more than a hundred of them fatally. And the numbers are rising. Mass killings, involving four or more victims, have nearly doubled in five years. Gun deaths among children, already at record highs, increased by 41.6% between 2018 and 2021.

School shootings, once rare and exceptional events, are on a similar spiral. In 2010 there were 13 such incidents nationwide. Last year, there were 79. This year, the number reached 77 by mid-November. Of the 36 deadliest shootings recorded since 1903, more than half occurred in the last decade.

No other generation has endured this. The death toll is growing because the weapons now available, and the right to carry them outside the home, are new. The norms of today would have been unthinkable to Americans of any other era.

Most Americans of the mid-20th century abhorred the concept of “preparatory armed carriage” and shuddered at the sight of a gun in public. Regulations against “going armed” were as old as the republic and staples of common law. Shotguns and hunting rifles were widely owned but handguns were feared and despised.

In 1959, nearly 6 out of 10 Americans favored a total ban on handguns, and only 16% of American households contained such a weapon, many of them in the South.

In 1969, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence recommended drastic measures to reduce the number of handguns in circulation, then estimated at 24 million.

“I am one of those persons who believe that violence and instruments of violence breed violence,” said Marvin E. Wolfgang, a professor of criminology who co-directed the task force on firearms. “If pushed to the wall, I would probably support the Japanese ruling that no one except a police officer should be allowed to possess or carry a pistol.”

The chairman of the commission, Milton S. Eisenhower, wanted to recommend a ban, settling instead on a policy of rigorous and selective licensing. Federal law, advised the commission, “should not consider normal household protection a sufficient showing of need to have a handgun.”

The problem did not go away, and Republican President Richard Nixon was among those who favored a ban. “I don’t know why any individual should have a right to have a revolver in his house,” he growled to aides in 1972. Never mind licensing; why “can’t we go after handguns, period?” he wondered. The National Rifle Association would be against it. The gun makers would be against it. But “people should not have handguns,” he insisted, with the usual stream of profanities. “Guns,” he once said, “are an abomination.”

Nixon was not alone. His attorney general, John N. Mitchell, declared on “The David Frost Show” that he was “diametrically opposed to anybody having a gun, except law enforcement officers.” In 1973, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals called for the criminalization of privately owned handguns and their complete eradication as civilian weapons by 1983. The nation was bleeding. A total ban on these agents of misery, urged Russell Peterson, chairman of the commission and a former Republican governor of Delaware, was long overdue.

Then came the storm. In June 1974, the City Council of Madison, Wisconsin, voted for a citywide ban on handguns in a mood of sonorous idealism. “Maybe one day when there are no guns in this community,” declared the jubilant young mayor, Paul Soglin, “the cops won’t have to carry them either.”

Forty years later, serving his third term as mayor, Soglin was fighting a different battle: to keep handguns — now legally carried across the state — off crowded buses. The dream was over. Republican lawmakers, not resting on their victory, were pressing to remove school zones from the last redoubts of gun-free spaces.

What changed? The short answer is President Ronald Reagan, whose crisp, Cold War thinking reduced domestic policy to a series of simple choices. Good and evil. Light and darkness. Arm the righteous, he promised, and crime will take care of itself. It was a “nasty truth,” he said, but criminals were not fazed by gun laws. The answer was to make firepower accessible to the good people: the silent majority who sustain the nation. The good guys, who never miss.

For the new conservative, guns were more than weapons: they were symbols of Americanism and vehicles of destiny. With Reagan’s arrival in the White House in 1981, the conversation shifted from controlling guns to “protecting” gun owners. Reagan embraced a militant NRA and pressed on with a “bill of rights for America’s gun owners,” against the recommendation of his own task force on violent crime.

“Only a madman could look at the problem we have in this country,” wrote Michael Beard, head of the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, “and then say that what this country needs is to weaken our handgun control laws.” But that was the agenda in 1984.

When Florida passed one of the nation’s first concealed carry laws the following year, Gov. Bob Graham, a Democrat, vetoed it as a policy pregnant with danger. “People could have come armed into shopping centers, movies and school yards,” a relieved and indignant senator said. Very soon they would.

When Texas passed a similar law in 1993, Democratic Gov. Ann Richards vetoed it with simmering rage. “On this day,” she declared, “we say no to the amateur gunslingers who think they will be braver and smarter with gun in hand.” The people of Texas, she had long argued, “do not need to be reminded that weapons of violence produce death to innocent children and adults.” The only conceivable outcome of the bill would be that more people would be “killed by gunfire.”

But this was no longer a debate. It was a culture war, in which facts were optional and reality negotiable. Opposition to the concealed weapons bill cost Richards the next election, and her successor, George W. Bush, duly signed it into law. “This is a bill to make Texas a safer place,” he said, with uncertain gravity. A new era had begun.

In 1986, only one state (Vermont) allowed citizens to carry a gun without a permit. Twenty-five states restricted the privilege to those who could demonstrate “good cause.” Sixteen states prohibited the carriage of firearms altogether.

By 2023, the revolution was all but complete: 27 states now allow the permitless, unrestricted “right to carry” that was almost unknown in the 20th century. Seventeen states operate on the permissive, “shall-issue” basis that terrified Graham and Richards when the idea was first presented. The number of states criminalizing the carriage of concealed handguns is now zero. And the training requirements that had formed such an important part of the original case for “concealed carry” have been widely abandoned.

If that were not enough, a revolution in the right to carry a gun has been accompanied by a revolution in the legalities of killing. Stand-your-ground laws have eliminated the ancient “duty to retreat” from confrontation, legalizing deadly force in situations of perceived as well as actual danger.

When standing your ground became fashionable, in the late 19th century, it was derided as a holdover from the Slave Power and a mortal threat to the rule of law. A hundred years later, it was back. In 2004, not a single state enshrined such a law, leaving the question to the discretion of the courts. Now, 38 are classified as “stand-your-ground” states, authorizing — some would say encouraging — lethal force in situations where it is by no means the last resort.

Finally: machine guns. In the 1920s, when gangsters armed with fully automatic “Tommy” guns began to terrorize the nation, their weapons were condemned as “the paramount example of peace-time barbarism.” The National Firearms Act of 1934 taxed them out of circulation, and automatic gunfire disappeared from American streets. The University of Texas massacre of 1966 was conducted by an ex-Marine sharpshooter with a sniper’s rifle. Such events were rare, not to say impossible, until the return of automatic firepower in the 1980s.

When 24-year-old Patrick Purdy killed five children and wounded 29 others with an AK-47 at an elementary school in Stockton, California, in 1989, few Americans were aware that such weapons were available to civilians. And few could have expected how virulently they would now be defended as an American prerogative.

“It’s beyond my comprehension,” said a public prosecutor in Detroit, “why these warlike weapons are available to the public.” “What are they going to do,” wondered a retired US Army colonel, “shoot down the trees?” Or as a former FBI agent distilled the issue with a clarity that is now poignant: “There’s always going to be a Purdy out there. It’s the guns we can do something about.”

Among those in favor of an immediate ban was first lady Barbara Bush, and almost certainly her husband, had he dared to speak his mind. But in the plunging vortex of a culture war, protecting guns became a patriotic necessity.

A National Rifle Association that frowned upon the AR-15 when it appeared at gun shows in the 1980s now became its fiercest defender. “People who never planned to buy one went out and got one,” recalled the libertarian activist Grover Norquist. “It was,” he cheerfully reported, “an F-you to the left.”

A weapon that accounted for less than 1% of gun sales in 1992 represented a quarter of the market in 2019. A weapon that vastly exceeds the killing power of the Tommy guns banned in the 1930s is affordable and freely accessible.

This is not freedom. It’s the unraveling of the American promise of peace and “domestic tranquility.” And whatever the Supreme Court decides in the gun case now under consideration, the history cannot be denied: This “constitutional right” to own a gun for self-defense is another product of our times — a right unknown before the “dramatic upheaval” of the District of Columbia v. Heller decision of 2008.

For decades, gun activists have claimed history for their radicalism, framing gun control as a failure of patriotism. But theirs is an imagined past, a brutalized freedom — and one that is now tearing American communities apart.

Any government that fails to protect the lives of its citizens from “reckless shootings,” warned  Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1931, “is out of step with modern thought.” We will have to go back before we can go forward––to an America where a life was more precious than a gun.

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